The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, communications and broadcast services. Market demands for such spacecraft have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on spacecraft payloads. For example, broadband service providers desire spacecraft with increased data rate capacity at higher EIRP through each of an increased number of user spot beans operable from geosynchronous orbit altitudes in communication with small (<1 meter aperture) user terminals.
A multi-beam antenna (MBA) system generates a set of user spot beams that define a coverage area which may extend, in aggregate, across a large region on the ground. MBA's providing wide-band communications services from a geosynchronous satellite conventionally provide contiguous coverage of a region with a triangular lattice of overlapping circular antenna beams. These beams are conventionally formed using clusters of radiating elements, also centered on a triangular lattice.
For high throughput satellite applications, some thousands of feed elements may be desired to illuminate a large aperture antenna reflector.
Improved techniques for implementing feed arrays with a large number of radiating elements are desirable.